Joséphine Bowes

Joséphine Bowes is better known today as a museum founder than as a painter, but she was a capable landscape artist in her own right. Her pictures show the French countryside in a calm, realist manner: rivers, lakes, trees, cornfields and grazing cattle.

Born Joséphine Coffin-Chevallier in Paris in 1825, she was an actress and singer at the Théâtre des Variétés, performing as Mlle Delorme, when she met the English collector John Bowes, who had bought the theatre. They married in 1852, and she left the stage to paint and collect. She studied with the landscape painter Karl Josef Kuwasseg and exhibited four times at the Paris Salon and once at the Royal Academy in London, rare achievements for a woman then. With her husband she founded the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle in County Durham, which still holds 55 of her paintings. She laid its foundation stone in 1869 but died in 1874, before it opened.